every heart heals a different way
by Wanderlustlover
Summary: Star knows this better than most, and sadly Edward Cullen is no wiser than most of the person she watches. But she has a vested interest and a job to do. A New Moon Milliways fic.


**Summary: **Star knows this better than most, and sadly Edward Cullen is no wiser than most of the person she watches. But she has a vested interest and a job to do. Set in the middle of New Moon's Cullen absence.

**Notes: **The colors and spacing don't transfer as well to AO3 or yet. Star is from The Tarot, and this fic is from/for Milliways.

* * *

**2006; **

**every heart heals a different way  
**

She's sitting on his windowsill.

He knows without looking. He can hear the way the fabric of her skirt shifts against the metal, catching it when it does and even when she forgets there is a skirt or a window and there's no sound to her shifting except from her hands on her lap or against each other. She's been coming for days now, watching him watch the ceiling.

It's something she would do. How she would according to Carlisle's memories.

He doesn't care. What is another voice in thousands, god or mortal, more ashes from the fire.

The only voice he cares about, the only voice he can't hear and can't stop hearing, is Bella's.

His mate. Beyond sanity and ludicrousness of their situation. The most important thing in his entire existence and he pushed her away. Told her the foulest lies and watched her heart break before his eyes. The last he heard of that voice, calling his name through the trees as he escaped into the hell he created for himself at the expense of her salvation.

He'll never hear that voice again.

Every one of the hundred voices in his head reminds of that.

Maybe he can be selfish in the sycophantic joy hers can't be one of them. Sitting above the windowsill, swinging her skirt and her moving her toes against her hem. She isn't mortal and so he doesn't have to hear the million thoughts in her head or see himself as he is, fallen beyond recognition again.

"I could let you."

He growls at the first words she's chosen for this newest night. Sharp and deep, from the festering center of himself, a warning at the trespass. But like she has done for the last few nights, she ignores it. He can tell by the way the cards in her hands are being shuffled at the same unchanged speed.

"It might drive you insane." Flip-flip goes the cards.  
"You are not mortal, but you are not one of us."

Flip. A edge against a solid object. A card unknown, watched, then slid, dainty back to it's rest again. "There are millions of them." Beat. "Universes. Their songs and tears on the breeze tracing down the walkway of the Path every moment. Inside each of us, inside every breath, of what you would consider a thought."

He tries not to think it, but how can he not. He's already sentenced himself. The scents of slum he's ascribed to himself for these weeks surrounded his sense. The scent of blood has gone beyond torture with his lack of food, into something he breathes in only to hurt himself with. He can not begin to hurt enough, be punished enough, for the wrong he has done her. But it surges even through that.

Somewhere somehow the smallest pieces of the most important world he shattered are touching her. Now. In this room.

He says nothing. Doesn't even turn his face away.

He doesn't know how many days it takes, how many times he debates it and rejects himself, rejects what she is and what he is. It goes on in cycles. His cell phone rings and he knows when the voice mail flashes, changing the light in the air just barely, someone is swearing and pleading somewhere. Days and weeks start and end. People move back and forth to their rhythms. Suns come and go. The moons, too. But a star sits perched on his window, sometimes talking, sometimes not, infinitely waiting.

Until.

It is the first word he's said aloud in three weeks of visits, but he doesn't have time to register it beyond it's saying or the first request for his own oblivion. Before Rio explodes in a miasmic spasm inside his mind. For the briefest flicker. The smallest catch of the most infinitely smallest part of a millionth of a millisecond he swears he can taste the salt of Bella's tears, can hear Alice and Carlisle with their voice raised sharp and bitter, before everything is noise. Noise with no color, with every sound and sight.

It is as though,

"Please."

beyond the memory of his worst torment  
a trickle in comparison to an onslaught of

else

to the feeling his sense of

scatters,  
not

but

, _of_

self

to

into

a million million places

like

drops

r

a

i

n

where it is only exquisitely c l e a r

and only full of pain, **NEED**

and when he is

,

lost

.o.b.l.i.t.e.r.a.t.e.d.

as part of a light,

a

,

fire

surrounding him,

that is so

,

pure

**so true so fierce  
so focused**

that it

beyond

and

burns

heat

illumination

he _screams_.


End file.
